


On Happy Endings

by NorroenDyrd



Series: Should Never Have Existed [17]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Battle Couple, Cole (Dragon Age) Being Cole, Cole (Dragon Age) Talks A Lot, Deep Roads, Dialogue-Only, F/M, Flashbacks, Helpful Cole (Dragon Age), Literature, Love, Minor Violence, Storm Coast (Dragon Age), The Western Approach, Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-07
Updated: 2018-08-07
Packaged: 2019-06-23 07:08:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15600990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NorroenDyrd/pseuds/NorroenDyrd
Summary: Cassandra Pentaghast worries too much about her Inquisitor in real life; when she reads her romance books, she would much rather be reassured by the promise of a happy ending.





	On Happy Endings

**Author's Note:**

> The Inquisitor here is the same as in the series at large (as referenced by Varric's nickname for him, Archie), but this can be read (and has been read) as a standalone.

Cassandra sits up in her bedroll with such force that almost all the fabric crumbles up into a twisted little rope underneath her, and bites ferociously into her finger nail. They are camping out under open skies tonight, so Varric catches sight of her fidgeting - whereupon it is his turn to lift himself up in an alert, almost eager pose.  
  
‘Looking pretty wired up there, Seeker,’ he calls out with a grin.  
  
She squints at him over the already fraying cover.  
  
‘There has to be a happy ending,’ she says, each word emphasized so heavily, with such long, deep gulps of breath in between, that it might seem as if she is threatening.. either the dwarf, or the dog-eared little tome in her hands.  
  
‘There has to be’.  
  
Varric shrugs.  
  
'Happy endings are a tad overrated, if you ask me. A memorable story has to leave you with your chest burning, with your heart bitten into and chewed up a little’.  
  
'No’.  
  
Unexpectedly, the word comes not from Cassandra, but from Cole, whose crouching, earth-poking form weaves itself out of trailing grey smoke close to Varric’s worn-through pancake of a pillow.  
  
Thrown off-kilter by the spirit boy’s curt, slightly hoarse interruption, The dwarf opens his mouth and then shuts it again without a sound. Not that Cole would have let him put a word in: he has begun to trail off into one of his cryptic singsong monologues, and the more he says, the paler Cassandra seems.  
  
'Blue. Deep blue, ripe, ready to burst into a jet of springing shadows like a rotting fruit. She isn’t quick enough, the voice of her helplessness still loud in her head, screaming about being blind in the dark that was before the blue - and while she pauses, he falls. A faceless dwarf leaps from the shadows, Purity worked into the metal-fused body in hard blue veins; two daggers flash, and he gargles, his pain sticky like hot tar inside his throat, hand pressed against the blooming redness on his robes. She rushes to him, the faceless out of the way, the Purity crumbling to dust after a single shield bash. She kneels, and holds, and winces as he tries to make a joke about swooning into her arms, again and again. Maker, please, please let him make it through this. Please give us a little more time… Time to wait… Before I am brave enough to tell him that I love him. She does not know, to the last moment, if her words will ever be heard’.  
  
'Shit,’ Varric whispers, pulling himself closer to Cassandra and giving his head a small, concerned shake. 'I remember how that creepy Sha-Brytol almost turned poor Archie into a pincushion’.  
  
Yet again, Cole ignores him, and moves on to what must be a different memory of Cassandra’s (the Seeker herself, in the meanwhile, has allowed her book to slip onto the ground, for the hand that once held it is now resting on her painfully contracting throat.  
  
'Green,’ Cole says thoughtfully. 'Green sea, green as sickness, pulling the guts into an endless heaving, up and down, up and down, together with its waves. He takes on a knight that bleeds with the wrong, wrong song: one on one, separated from the others - from her! - two figures clashing against the square-toothed mouth of the cave, the heaving green behind them. The knight crashes down into that green, in the end, throat pierced by glowing ice, the song going quiet at long last; but he grabs him by the ankle, red claws glittering like jewelry, and drags him away into the green. She sees, and stops, and the world stops around her. She calls his name, roaring voice melting into the roaring green. She does not know, to the last moment, if he will ever answer back’.  
  
'He did,’ Cassandra says weakly. 'He and the red templar had landed on a ledge, and once he shook that wretch off, he clawed his way back up… And he…’  
  
Her mouth twitches; she is struggling to sound angry, but does not quite manage it.  
  
'He dared to bow at me when he straightened up!’  
  
Cole looks at her with his vacant, glassy blue eyes.  
  
'Red,’ he breathes, scooping up a handful of soil and letting it pass through his fingers.  
  
'Red sun and red sand and red rage broiling between the dragon’s ribs. She thought she was going to eat: softened gurn meat, circled with white coils of quillback intestines, a phoenix feather sticking out in the middle, swaying in the wind, decorating, beckoning - but instead, she found hunters waiting for her. And she wants to turn to them into so much red. Red cloud of dust under impatient claws; red glimmer of dark joy in a lonely eye, wide and wild, boss you’re the best. And then, red gash across his forehead, red sand grains clinging to his robes as he rolls over, kicked aside by the dragon’s frustrated foot. She is by his side in a split second after he is knocked over, fighting his hands, unsteady but stubborn, as he strains, sobs, struggles to keep her shielded from dragon fire with his magic, even though it’s his life that is slipping away. One red drop after the other, watering the red sand. She does not know, to the last moment, if this is the last spell he will ever cast’.  
  
There is a pause, tense and heavy, as both Cassandra and Varric think back to the dragon fight that Cole has just described - and then, the spirit boy repeats after himself,  
  
'She does not know. She does not know. But books are not blue and green and red; they are far simpler - black ink on white paper - and you have the power to set an ending. To know it beforehand. So if the ending is in your hands, why not make it a happy one?’  
  
Cole trails off, and Varric rubs the bridge of his nose in concentration.  
  
'You know, kid, Tiny told me pretty much the same thing recently. Well, as close as it gets to the same thing anyway. “I don’t need books to know life is shit,” he told me… And well… Life sure is shit, isn’t it? So yeah. Seeker. If you need sappy happily ever after stories to distract yourself from the thought of all the unknown danger Archie throws himself in every day… I cannot really judge. Sorry about that’.  
  
'I…’ Cassandra stumbles over her own words, taken by surprise when she meets Varric’s gaze and realizes that he is being earnest. 'Thank you. I… I come so close to losing him so very often… It is comforting to know that there are people who don’t lose each other after all’.


End file.
